As an avid golfer and the founder of a small suburban law firm, Ed Fleury well understands that the fairway is a good place to cultivate relationships with builders and other commercial real estate clients. If your clients are your friends and they are satisfied that you are providing a good service at the right price, he says, “they’re reluctant to go away from you, because it gets embarrassing for them.”

But Fleury has reached a point in his career where a golf game may sometimes take precedence over an Ontario Municipal Board hearing. So how can he explain this to his long-term clients, hand them off to younger lawyers, and still maintain their loyalty to his firm? This is a challenge now faced by almost any law firm, large or small, at a time when last call is approaching for a huge segment of the bar.

“It’s something that all firms are looking at seriously now. It’s a big issue,” says Ross Ellison, a senior partner at Davis LLP in Vancouver.

Larger firms have the advantage of being able to serve clients with a team of lawyers, yet a lot still turns on the personal relationship between the team leader and the general counsel or department head at the client company, says Paul Boniferro, a partner and leader of the labour and employment group at McCarthy Tétrault LLP. “While the client may have stayed with the firm for many years because they’ve worked with one particular lawyer, when that lawyer retires it’s a very good time for clients to look around and see who else is available.”

The goal for any law firm is, as Boniferro puts it, “to be in a position that, when lawyers announce that they have decided to retire, the client already has connections with other lawyers within the practice group or firm, so that their tendency is not to look elsewhere.”

But achieving this goal may require some delicate, two-way diplomacy on the part of law firm leaders. They not only have to reassure clients that nobody is giving them the brush-off. They also have to tread carefully with partners who may not be ready to think about retirement and may fear that letting go of their best clients could mean losing their stake in the game. “It’s absolutely critical to the firm’s survival, but it’s tough to fight individual behaviour,” says consultant Karen MacKay of Phoenix Legal Inc. in Toronto.

At law firms that compensate people on the basis of how much they produce, there is “obviously an inherent conflict for somebody who’s got two, three, or four years to go,” says Ellison, who maintains that the fundamental step law firms must make is to protect partners’ incomes and give them an incentive to make the transition early.